This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Java Buzz by Nick Lothian. Original Post: Release Early, Release Often, or at least Release! Feed Title: BadMagicNumber Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Badmagicnumber Feed Description: Java, Development and Me Latest Java Buzz Posts Latest Java Buzz Posts by Nick Lothian Latest Posts From BadMagicNumber

Ever heard the phrase Release Early, Release Often? Have you ever considered that the most important word in that sentence (from a Bayesian point of view as well as my own ;-)) is Release?

As noted in by Morgan Delagrange, Maven makes it very easy to add dependencies to weird versions of other projects.

In particular, I see an increasing number of open source Java projects that rely on CVS version (i.e. unreleased) of the code from other projects.

I think it is really important not to do this. Ignoring the fact that unreleased code is - well - unreleased - it also dramatically increases the likely hood of dependency conflicts.

Unfortunately a lot of the jars in the Maven repository do not follow this practice, and there does not seem to be significant social pressure to stop people uploading and using random jar versions. For example at the time of writing Maven itself has 24 dependencies - 6 of which are obviously CVS builds. A further 8 are marked "dev" or "beta" which probably means they are actual releases, so I don't necessarily have an issue with those ones (See http://maven.apache.org/dep endencies.html).

Perhaps a contributing factor to this problem is the fact that some projects make very infrequent public releases. That makes it difficult for other projects to pick up critical bug fixes or new features without using a CVS version. I've seen projects that had an active development community, had plenty of other projects using their libraries and yet didn't release a new version of their library for over a year. I'm pretty sure I saw a tool that measured how much code had changed between a local copy of some code and a CVS label - something that is useful to keep an eye on for each of your dependencies.

See http://jakarta.apac he.org/commons/versioning.html for a decent guide to how versioning should be done.

I guess I shouldn't be too critical of Maven. Build management is a topic which is very easy to have an opinion about, but incredibly hard to actually do right. To the best of my knowledge Maven is the most successful and most widely deployed build management tool around, and I think it is a very impressive piece of work.